Author: Victoria Kim
Published on: 21/01/2025 | 00:00:00

AI Summary:
A Nobel Laureate Who Mines Her Country’s Nightmares, and Her Own Han Kang’s latest novel, about a South Korean massacre, delves into why atrocities must be remembered. Ms. Han, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature last year, has written books about two of South Korea’s darkest moments. Kyungha, a writer who is tormented by a nightmare after publishing a book about a city called “G—,” plods her way through heavy snow engulfing Jeju. It was there that between 1947 and 1954, an estimated 30,000 people were killed by police officers, soldiers and anti-Communist vigilantes. About a third of the victims were women, children or elderly people. Ms. Han, 54, first rose to broad acclaim among English-speaking readers in 2016 with her novel “The Vegetarian” Its transfixing language and unflinching tale of a housewife’s quiet revolt against violence and patriarchy captured readers around the world. In South Korea, she had been an established writer of poetry, short stories and novels for more than two decades. Kim Seon-young, who edited the Korean version of “Human Acts” and has since become a friend, recalled that Ms. Han once jokingly told her that if her plane crashed, Ms Kim was forbidden to change a syllable they’d disagreed about. The Nobel came during another tumultuous period for South Korea, which has yet to come to a conclusion. Han said she watched the developments unfold until the National Assembly repealed the martial law decree in the early morning hours. “In that way, the past and present are connected,” she said. In Tibet, the Chinese government is placing children in boarding schools in a drive to assimilate them into the national mainstream.

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